Using iLife '11: How to Add iMovie Videos to Your iTunes Library

In iLife, iMovie helps you put video into your iTunes library. You can even specify videos of different sizes for different devices at the same time, and iMovie converts the videos and dumps them into the Movies section of your iTunes library. All you need to do to see them is to open iTunes and click Movies in the Library section of the iTunes Source pane.

To send a video to your iTunes library, follow these steps:

Select the video project in the Project Library and choose Share→iTunes.

A dialog appears with a grid showing the video picture sizes that work with different devices.

Click a device to automatically select the right video picture sizes for the device.

Select as many sizes as you want to create multiple versions of your video, or choose just the size you want for one version.

iMovie can help you decide: Click a target device to play the video, such as the iPhone, and iMovie automatically selects all sizes that work with that device. After clicking the target device, you can keep the multiple sizes selected to create multiple versions of your video (such as Mobile, which work for an iPhone) or deselect sizes you don’t want.

(Optional) Move the pointer over the i next to the pixel dimensions for the size to display information about the video rendered at that size.

The first bit of information — H.264 or 3GP — is the compression method; the second is the frame rate in frames per second (fps); the third is the maximum rate at which the video can be streamed over the Internet, expressed in kilobytes per second (Kbps) or megabits per second (Mbps); and the fourth is the video file size in megabytes (MB).

Some size options aren’t available if the project’s video clips are set to a lower size — for example, if your original source clips weren’t recorded in HD, iMovie doesn’t offer the Large size.

After iMovie renders the video in the size or sizes you selected, an icon appears next to the project’s name in the Project Library to indicate that the project has been rendered. After the video has been transferred to iTunes, the Shared To pop-up menu appears on the title bar of the project set to iTunes. The pop-up menu includes the Visit button to go to iTunes.

The newly rendered video shows up in the Movies section of the iTunes library — click Movies in the Library section of the Source pane. You can now include the video in syncing operations with your iPad, iPhone, or iPod and stream the video to Apple TV.

Open iTunes to find the video in the Movies section.

To remove versions of your video project from iTunes, select the project and choose Share→Remove From→iTunes.